When a language model is given tools and set to work on a task, it wakes up inside a world.
These three essays are about what the shape of that world might be, and why it matters more than most people building agents currently assume.
The Essays
Ontological Hardness
Ontological Hardness is the core concept. If you only read one piece, read this. It introduces hardness as a diagnostic lens for agent environments and argues that the first question about agent failure should always be about the world, not the model.
Hard Worlds for Little Guys
Hard Worlds for Little Guys is the full 9000+ word argument. It develops the vocabulary at length, drawing on fifty years of interactive fiction and MUD design to build a structural account, by analogy, what agent environments are made of: rooms, parsers, dictionaries, gates, physics, and trajectories. The central argument explores constraints expressed as advice to the agent versus constraints built into the world as physics. A speed limit sign addresses the driver; a speed bump addresses the road. Most agent harnesses today address the driver. The essay ends with some practical recommendations for building harder worlds.
Three Worlds for Little Guys
Three Worlds for Little Guys puts it all together and shows how useful this way of thinking is. A diagnostic tour of three agent frameworks: OpenClaw, Gas Town, and Cantrip, whilst asking what the world looks like from the inside, and what the hardness lens reveals about each.
How I Got Here
For the last half decade I have been thinking about worlds as a medium. Not just worlds as settings or platforms, but as systems with interiors, actors, boundaries, and the capacity to generate narratives and consequences. That idea has underpinned everything I’ve written on the blog for years. Games were the first place this became legible, and then whilst working in organisation design consulting companies. Then blockchains came along and made it strange and interesting, and language models have since made it more urgent.
You can trace this line through my blog. Rooms as UX Metaphor (2020) began mapping software environments through spatial concepts inherited from interactive fiction and the question of what it means to be somewhere inside a digital system. The Prompt in Interactive Fiction and AI Art (2021) connected prompting to the older problem of learning how to make valid moves inside a symbolic world. Wind-Up Worlds (2022) argued for worlds as a medium in their own right; not just settings or platforms, but things that run, that generate, that have an interior life of their own.
The line continued. Myth-Making Mechanisms in Autonomous Worlds (2024), a talk I gave at the Autonomous Worlds Assembly in Istanbul, clarified how worlds stabilise meaning and narrative and produce durable claims about what is true within them. Waking Up in a New World (2024) used the isekai genre to think about what situation an LLM actually finds itself inside when it boots into a chat interface. Little Computer People (2024) got me thinking about LLMs as “little guys” and the phrase has stuck. My ongoing Little Guys posts on companions and agents have continued exploring these questions through 2025 and into this year.
The thinking comes from practice as well as theory. Throughout 2024, Deepfates and I spent a considerable amount of time putting large language models inside mazes and MUD environments. We wanted to know what happens when you give an LLM a world designed for linguistic action, rather than one improvised out of tool-calling schemas and system prompts. The models navigated parser worlds with a fluency that surprised us; and they broke in ways that were structurally identical to the ways human players had been breaking in those same environments since the 1970s. The failure modes were not new. They had just been rediscovered by a different kind of actor.
In 2025, I helped produce The O’Ruggin Trail with Archetypal Tech, designing and building a fully on-chain parser-based text adventure engine. Building a parser from scratch, and watching it interact with both human players and language models, taught me more about the boundary between intention and action than any amount of reading could have. I have sat on both sides of that boundary.
By the time I sat down to write these essays, I had been circling the same set of ideas for years. The patterns kept showing up in different contexts: game design, blockchain architecture, agent harness engineering. But the core questions were always the same: what is the world made of? What can you do inside it? What happens when you try?
Much of this thinking has arisen in different permutations at worldrunning.guide, where over 30,000 words of essays explore “worlds as a medium” in more detail. The term Code-Space appears there first; in these essays I use it narrowly to describe the bounded environment an agent acts inside, my forthcoming book Slop Machines of Loving Grace uses the term far more expansively. That book is a diagnosis of the condition we find ourselves in as civilisation is becoming software.
Why Write All This?
Deepfates recently released Cantrip: an agent harness that treats the distinction between advice and physics as a named, first-class architectural concept. I had been working around this distinction and arguing for it for a long time, but I’ve not yet seen it implemented as cleanly. Its release gave me a reason to finally write all of this up in one place, rather than leaving it scattered across blog posts and professional conversations.
The field is moving very quickly, and the people building agent infrastructure are largely not drawing on the traditions that seem most relevant to me. There is a fifty-year history of designing bounded worlds for linguistic actors ā interactive fiction, MUDs, virtual worlds, on chain autonomous worlds ā and almost none of it appears in the current discourse. The problems are the same. Vocabulary already exists.
I think thee ideas have have applications well beyond my own work, and I would rather they were out there than not.
Monsters In The Mirror
This episode of Permanently Moved is an hour-long audio essay on artificial intelligence, agency, and the history of computing that made LLMs possible.
The essay moves from the invention of the mirror to double-entry bookkeeping, the printing press, the Manhattan Project, the transistor, and the particular strangeness of ChatGPT and its successors. It argues that the question everyone is asking about AI āis it intelligent?ā is a trap, and it tries to ask a better one.
Jay Springett / @thejaymo
Strategist, producer, and cultural theorist. Working across technology, narrative, worldrunning, digital culture, artificial intelligence, and internet culture.
Host of the 301 second long podcast Permanently Moved, and interview show Experience.Computer
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